Just how much magic can a single corn seed hold?

　　Cooperatives cut costs and raise incomes, building a full corn industry chain

Gongzhuling City in Jilin is located in the heart of the Songliao Plain, the "golden corn belt". The corn it produces has a first-grade rate close to 100%, and its perennial sown area is around 280,000 hectares, nearly 90% of the total cultivated land, earning it the title "Hometown of Chinese Corn".

Most local farm machinery is concentrated in the hands of large operators and cooperative organizations, and most farming households entrust their cultivated land to large operators and cooperatives. Xue Yaohui's Wanxin Farmers' Cooperative emerged in response to this need.

"We cover the whole industry chain, from sowing to selling grain," Xue Yaohui said. Locally, if a farming household does everything from planting to harvest itself, the cost is 7,500 yuan per hectare; when the cooperative does the farming, the input per hectare is only 5,000 yuan. After the grain is harvested, the cooperative stores it free of charge for the farmers. When farmers want to sell their grain, the cooperative buys it at one fen per jin above the market price.

Walking into the Wanxin Cooperative's warehouse, harvesters, tractors, land-preparation machines and seeders of various models are lined up in rows, an impressive sight. "These are all our treasures; they are how we earn our money," Xue Yaohui said. The pressing task is to cut costs at every stage of production and return the benefits to the farmers. Take agricultural machinery services: for cooperative members the fee is 20% below the market price, and this alone saves 1,200 yuan per shang of land.

Wanxin Cooperative is located in Shanqian Village, Liufangzi Subdistrict, Gongzhuling City. It now has more than 1,120 member households, owns 210 machines and implements of various types for cultivation, planting and harvesting, is equipped with 5 professional repair vehicles, and has a 5,900-square-meter agricultural machinery repair workshop. As of last year, it had transferred 6,660 mu of land, provided machinery services over 11,700 mu, and reached several surrounding townships.

With mechanization in place, further raising efficiency is no easy task. Old Xue is now working on crop varieties. According to his research, good varieties suitable for mechanical grain harvesting have advantages such as high lodging resistance, hard cobs and fast grain dehydration, which bring many benefits for grain growers:

Lower expenses. In the past, harvesting, transporting, storing and threshing one hectare of corn required 1,800 yuan; mechanical grain harvesting requires only 1,200 yuan per hectare.

Guaranteed harvest quality. In the past, factors such as transport, drying and storage caused losses of about 1,400 jin of grain per hectare. Grain harvesting can be dried directly, greatly reducing losses and increasing income by more than 1,600 yuan per hectare.

This year Wanxin planted 112 hectares of the variety Defeng 919, which is suitable for mechanical corn grain harvesting. The corn harvester directly harvests, threshes and dries the grain for storage. Mechanical corn grain harvesting effectively lowers grain moisture, and by calculation it can save 5-10 yuan per ton in drying costs during the grain drying process. The cooperative has now built a 27,000-square-meter grain drying and storage center, 4 thousand-ton grain storage bins, a grain collection and storage warehouse able to store 75,000 tons of grain, and a drying tower that dries 300 tons of grain in one pass.

Only with scale can advantages be brought into play. "We used to get headaches over burning straw, but now waste straw has become a treasure," Xue Yaohui said as he did the accounts: the cooperative bales the straw and transports it away to sell to power plants; each hectare produces more than 6 tons of dry straw; the cooperative earns 700 yuan per hectare, and feeding straw to cattle brings in more than 900 yuan per hectare. Each year the cooperative earns more than 500,000 yuan from straw recycling alone.

　　A "special" corn field where 565 varieties let farmers "look at the crop and choose the seed"

At present, wheat in the Huang-Huai-Hai region has basically achieved full mechanization, while corn is still mainly harvested as ears by machine or by hand, and the transport, turning and drying, and threshing after harvest are highly labor-intensive.

In Yuhuangmiao Town, Shanghe County, Jinan City, there is a very "special" corn field: beside each plot stands a variety display board marked with information such as the variety number, planting area and yield, the plots are separated by concrete roads, and drainage ditches connect along both sides of the roads.

This is the largest corn field planting demonstration area in Shandong Province, covering 465 mu, with 565 varieties from more than 100 seed companies in 25 provinces and cities, basically encompassing all corn varieties in the Huang-Huai-Hai region.

"These more than 500 varieties are divided into 4 directions: ordinary, fresh-eating, silage and mechanical harvesting. Corn for the same use is displayed together, which is very intuitive," said Meng Zhaodong, Party secretary of the Corn Research Institute of the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The corn here consists of leading varieties from various market regions, as well as the flagship varieties that will take over or be upgraded in the next few years.

Field management is strict. Pang Shangshui of the Linyu Grain Planting Cooperative introduced that a management model of unified planning and layout, unified planting specifications, unified sowing, unified water and fertilizer management, and unified pest and disease control is adopted here to ensure that all exhibited varieties have good growing conditions. Take land preparation and sowing: distances are precise to the centimeter, with 6 rows per bed and a row spacing of 60 cm; each variety (combination) is planted in 12 rows, 18 m long, with a display area of 0.2 mu; to avoid the influence of sowing-time differences on variety performance, the displayed varieties (combinations) are sown on the same day.

Chen Shaojiang, professor at China Agricultural University and deputy director of the National Maize Improvement Center, said that the display trials here are fairly standardized and the management is also very much in place, and the performance of the varieties basically reflects the overall level of the Huang-Huai-Hai region.

The field planting demonstration area allows farming entities to "look at the crop and choose the seed" on site. Jiang Qinggong, head of the Shandong Provincial Seed Management Station, said that as of mid-September, more than 3,500 person-times had come to observe, study and select seeds.

　　A "stubborn" breeder developed 39 new varieties, promoted over 200 million mu

High corn yields cannot be achieved without breeding. Breeding expert Cheng Xiangwen is honorary president of the Hebi Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Henan. "From a distance he looks like a beggar, up close like a charcoal burner, and only when you ask do you find out he's from the academy of agricultural sciences!" The local people all joke with Old Cheng's team this way. In 50 years of breeding, Cheng Xiangwen traveled back and forth between Hebi and Hainan, covering a distance that could circle the Earth 7 times.

In the 1960s and 1970s, cornmeal was "good food" for farmers, and they often still did not have enough to eat. Cheng Xiangwen made up his mind back then: he must develop high-yield seeds so that his fellow villagers could all eat their fill!

Corn is a single-cross hybrid; using second-generation seed reduces yield by about 30% per mu, so the seed must be changed every year. The cycle for developing a new corn variety is 12 years; by using southern multiplication and northern breeding, two generations can be grown each year, so it can be completed in 6 years.

In 1964, 28-year-old Cheng Xiangwen carried more than 50 jin of corn seed and began a southern breeding journey: from Xun County to Luopeng Village in Sanya City, Hainan. The trip took 20 days, squeezing onto trains, transferring to buses and taking ships. That same year, he brought back from Hainan the first batch of corn hybrid seeds he had developed. After being planted locally in Xun County, the yield per mu jumped from more than 100 jin to five or six hundred jin.

After that, Cheng Xiangwen carried out southern multiplication and northern breeding and developed 39 new corn varieties, which were promoted over more than 200 million mu in total, increasing economic benefits by more than 15 billion yuan.

Now, in the experimental field of the Hebi Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Henan, farmers can take out their phones and scan the QR code on the corn label to clearly see the cultivation characteristics and traits of each variety and know when to fertilize and water, and how much to apply and use. The real-time monitoring systems at the Hebi base and the Hainan base allow scientific and technical personnel to guide corn planting at the Hainan breeding base while staying in Hebi. By checking the monitoring system, they can understand corn growth conditions and discuss emerging problems online.

Cheng Xiangwen said that the Huang-Huai-Hai region is China's main corn production area, with a planting area of 190 million mu, accounting for more than 35% of the national total. The varieties developed must meet conditions such as early maturity, lodging resistance and disease resistance in order to realize the transition from the current ear harvesting to grain harvesting.

Vice Minister of Agriculture Yu Xinrong said that this year, trials of corn varieties suitable for mechanical grain harvesting will continue to be arranged in the main corn production areas of Northeast China and the Huang-Huai-Hai region, with 55 trial sites and 2,535 trial varieties. Varieties that have completed the regional trial and production trial procedures and meet the requirements for mechanical grain harvesting varieties are expected to pass approval early next year.